Indian Resistance to Early Muslim Invaders Up to 1206 A.D.

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Ram Gopal Misra's monumental work Indian Resistance to Early Muslim Invaders up to 1206 A.D. presents, for the first time, a cogent account of the prolonged and sustained efforts of the Hindus to stem the onslaught of early Islamic invaders (636 to 1206 CE).

The politico-military and cultural resistance of the Hindus was spread across five and a half centuries until its decline in the last decade of the twelfth century. Historians emphasize merely the ultimate collapse of the Hindus, largely ignoring the earlier resistance offered by them. The sustained resistance encountered by the Muslim armies in India was not faced by them in any other land they conquered.

We can fathom the magnitude of the Indian resistance if we recall that the effective Mus- lim rule over North India, not to speak of the whole of India, which was less, if ever, lasted a mere five centuries (1206 to 1707 CE).

DR. RAM GOPAL MISRA was born in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh in 1931. After a brilliant academic career lead- ing to a first class first M.A. degree in history, he retired as the Head of the Department of History in Nanak Chand Anglo Sanskrit College, Meerut. For his work he was awarded the Ph.D. degree by Meerut University. The present work is the result of a lifetime of teaching and original thinking on the part of the author.

The present thesis is an attempt to provide a connected account of the prolonged and sustained efforts made by the Indians to stem the tide of early Muslim invaders. The political and military resistance was spread over more than five and a half centuries till its final collapse in Northern India in the last decade of the twelfth century A.D. For long, the historians of India have emphasized merely the ultimate collapse of the Indians, ignoring completely the earlier resistance offered by them. It is a fact of history that such sustained resistance as encountered by the Muslim armies in India was not faced by them in any other land conquered by them. If the present thesis helps to correct the imbalance even in a small measure, I shall feel my labours sufficiently rewarded.

The Indian Resistance had another facet, which was outcome of the resolute determination of the Indians to preserve their religious and cultural identity. While country after country, from the Strait of Gibraltar to the banks of the Indus, witnessed the rapid Islamization of their individual cultures, Northern India managed to survive as a predominantly 'heathen' land even after five centuries of Muslim rule.

FROM THE VERY dawn of history, India has been known as a land of plenty. Its fertile valleys and plains of the north have held the lure for foreign invaders to conquer and very often to settle down permanently. Through its mountain passes in the north- west-the Khyber and the Bolan-have come wave after wave of foreign invaders, eager to displace the previous settlers from the fertile lands of modern Punjab and the Indo-Gangetic plains. The ever-present danger of these invasions inculcated among the Indians a fierce spirit of resistance to the invader, an aspect which has not been duly stressed by historians.

The reason is that the historians during the British rule (and to a large extent to this day) were working with an imperialist bias toward history-writing. There- fore the history of India during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries is the history of a country under colonial domination.